An Insular Man Finds No Port In Final Storm

October 23, 2005|By Joan Mellen The Baltimore Sun

Slow Man. J.M. Coetzee. Viking. $24.95. 208 pp.

Slow Man, the latest novel by South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, opens unpromisingly with a street accident. Paul Rayment, an aging, retired photographer, an ordinary man of less-than-ordinary interest, is hit by a car while riding his bicycle in downtown Adelaide, Australia. A doctor indifferent to those on the far side of life hacks off his leg above the knee.

Paul soon becomes obsessed with his nurse-caregiver, a "tubby" Croatian immigrant named Marijana. He plunges into a predictable romantic delusion of early-onset old age. Before long, Paul is ready to deplete his fortune and his tranquillity in a hopeless effort to win the married Marijana.

Long-gone is the Coetzee of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980); The Life and Times of Michael K (1983); and Age of Iron (1990), whose characters struggle to eke out personal lives within a deranged historical framework. Apartheid is absent, but history is not. Yet Coetzee, with the masochistic convolutions of Disgrace (1999), has apparently abandoned the dialectic between the personal and the political that rendered his novels so rich and brimming with tension, ambiguity and purpose.

Not a minute too soon, Coetzee reveals that he is well aware of the mundane narcissism of Paul Rayment's plight. A third of the way into Slow Man, with stealth, Coetzee places at Paul's door the main character of his last novel, Elizabeth Costello (2003), a novelist and animal-rights activist known for wrestling with moral issues: "Why there is evil in the world, and what if anything can be done about it." Elizabeth arrives as Coetzee's emissary to confront Paul with his unnecessary passivity and inability to act, and with the paucity of his passion, an "affliction" Paul defends as "unavoidable."

Like truth, realism is as elusive in life as in art. The predictable plot of Paul's life, not least his falling in the shower, is no more "real" than the resurrection of a character from another of Coetzee's books. Nothing matters but penetrating the moral question at the heart of all fiction: "how to be," as Stein puts it in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim; Conrad has been an avowed model for Coetzee.

As stand-in for the author, Elizabeth frees Coetzee from servicing the banalities of dramatized action. Themes can be declared. She raises the issue of how best to navigate growing old. Laden with regrets, like "roosting birds," Paul has attempted to appropriate Marijana's son to ease the pain of his leaving "no trace behind, not even an heir to carry on his name." Elizabeth subjects Paul's delusions to the clear light of reason.

Elizabeth would sweep away Paul's romantic fantasy. She observes, matter-of-factly, that, an "ugly old man," he should simply pay some obliging woman for sexual favors. With postmodern agility, Paul resists both the author and his surrogate; realism is not the legal tender he chooses. Meanwhile, Elizabeth becomes increasingly irritated with both Paul and Coetzee, who have "saddled" her with a pedestrian fictional subject, a "one-legged man who cannot make up his mind."

While Paul complains, with postmodern reflexivity, that Elizabeth is "trying to take over my life" as he chafes under the control of two authors, one present, the other not, Elizabeth in turn behaves as if Paul is answerable neither to herself nor to Coetzee. She demands that he "live like a hero ... be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?"

She treats Paul as if he were a free man, able to choose to be a worthy subject. But like real-life beings, Paul, an immigrant carrying into old age the childhood trauma of having been transplanted from France to Australia, cannot grow, change, develop, or act on the enlightenment that comes his way.

Near the end, Elizabeth proposes that she and Paul move in together. After all, they are already family, each a figment of the imagination of J.M. Coetzee. The symmetry is as believable as anything else in fiction.

Elizabeth is in her 70s, a weary, aging woman who can promise "care: someone to hold our hand now and then," but neither sensuality nor romance. An autonomous individual, free of the presumed omniscience of Elizabeth or Coetzee, her master, Paul rejects the proposal, even as they are both "starved for love." Paul is dismissing as well that bullying author who has forced him to play out his stories, as if he were a "puppet," or, what is worse for Coetzee, an animal imprisoned in a "zoo" on display for the edification of strangers.

In thrall to childhood damage, ill at ease in a country where he has never felt at home, Paul cannot open his heart, nor ever will. Believing himself to be a "free agent," free even of Coetzee, the author of his life, Paul chooses to remain insular, solitary and without human connection.

It is as dour an ending as that of Disgrace, where the main character presides willfully, gratuitously, and heartbreakingly over the death of the elegant musical dog. The moral is lucid: only "loving hands" and a "loving heart" render life endurable. In this dark tour de force, Coetzee holds out hope for neither.